La formación académica sobre los libros y la lectura a través de los estudios de comunicación no verbal

Abstract

With the growing use of audiovisual means, nonverbal communication studies offer invaluable help in the formation of children, adolescents and adults as readers of printed books, sensitizing them, first, to their interaction with books as objects sensorially and intellectually appreciated, which enriches their "reading act." The aim is to make them conscious of the complex grid of verbal and nonverbal components (plus the multiple functions of possible graphic illustrations) present in a literary text, namely, the many sensorial (direct and, most important, synesthesial) and intelligible experiences, including somatic, extrasomatic and environmental sounds, whether described or evoked in the printed text, as well as explicit or implicit silences which readers must experience also during their reading. To which we should add four dimensions treated here too: the influence on readers of both personal circumstances and the environment while reading; the reader's desirable mute or audible oralization of the text; the specific characteristics of the reading act when it is seriously limited by different states of reduced interaction, such as blindness or paralysis; and the adult readers' retroactive attraction of books they read in their childhood and adolescence, which should make us foster the good care of books in those age periods.